Monday, March 01, 2010

The Ban List

It currently has one member: Gabriel. (WOMI was removed last time I changed the comment policy. He originally got on for doing a similar repetition act Gabe's doing now, only he was a Creationist.) The reason for his banning is essentially groaning boredom on the part of some of my readers, and I can't blame them: Gabriel hasn't learned anything about what we actually believe, and thus it's become pointless to read his repetition of straw men, ad hominem fallacies (why the hell does he think this is about penis passport dueling with some random guy on the internet?)

So, Gabriel, included below are a few ways you can get yourself unbanned by submitting comments:1. Post a criticism of my actual views on the topic of race. There's no shortage of my commentary in the various threads for you to read.2. Define what you mean by "race," "white," and "black." Are they based on genetics in any way?3. A link and/or citation of a study showing some sort of meaningful neurological differences between people of different races.

Anything else is subject to rejection. If you had any idea of what skepticism and science really are, you'd understand why you've been failing so hard. Try doing something different and interesting for a change. It's been fun seeing you flail about in a useless and predictable manner, but I think it's time to move on if you can't show me something unexpected.

Once a week, I may drop a comment in this thread summarizing what Gabe tries. I predict it'll just be a stream of redundancy, and we don't need space wasted on stuff we've already been over multiple times.

Well, Gabe submitted his first post-ban pile of stupid, in the form of vanity: He once again pointed out how quiet the blog was, saying it went that way because of his silence, because obviously there's absolutely zero chance that I could have a life outside this blog. Nope. TV sitcoms and his psychic powers tell him that the universe revolves around him.

And, of course, he whined about delusions of persecution, rather than attempt to grow beyond his copy-paste mental process.

Of course, he once again accused me of denying unspecified evidence, even though I've accepted just about every piece of evidence he's ever bothered to talk about: He's too stupid to notice that we're complaining about how his poor logic and voodoo approach to statistical analysis make his conclusion invalid.

Gabe, if you want to keep arguing, try doing something, you know, unexpected. You've been banned for being repetitive, not for saying the truth. Also, if I were interested in suppressing the "truth" of your statements, why haven't I deleted your previous comments?

Get Gabe to read Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond before he posts any more of repetative ignorance gleaned from sad redneck fantasy sites.That way at least he'll have gotten some relevant information on what he is supposed to be commenting about.

The weekly Gabriel update is a bit late, since I've been studying for a midterm. In short, Gabe hasn't even tried to meet the unbanning criteria. He's just playing the same tune over again.

March 4th: Long post (divided in two because of the character limit).

Repeated theme: The substance dualism of "white technology" is invoked. Science, and by extension, technology are primarily about building on the work of others. Inventions don't spring into people's minds from a vacuum. I've previously pointed out that mathematics owes a lot to the Arabian world (before it fell into the current dark age, significantly influenced by a fundamentalism many Americans are currently trying to imitate.)

The problem Gabe has when we talk about how to define a technology as "white" is that he readily flip-flopped between whether or not it counted if it was based on earlier technology of a different origin: New computer chips designed in Japan, for example, apparently didn't count, but "white" inventions that ultimately rely on principles of mathematics discovered by non-whites still count as white. No explanation of how race is even relevant. Might as well talk about "people-who-can-curl-their-tongue technology" since that'd be equally valid without any mechanism of action.

Gabriel then goes on to posit scenarios with ridiculously over-the-top people.

1. I would save the girl first, but it has more to do with her youth, innocence, intelligence, and obvious potential. A drug dealing criminal gets a lower priority, as well as the miserly embezzler. Race doesn't enter the decision.

2. Sounds like a clear cut case of self-defense.

3. Of course the court shouldn't be considered anti-Semitic. Murder is murder is murder, and the assailant should be charged accordingly. Just because a person's a minority doesn't mean that they're innocent.

4. No, they aren't racist for treating the AIDS-spreading rapist as dangerous enough to quarantine. Race has nothing to do with the decision. Switch the person to any other race, and I'd still evaluate the decision the same way.

5. The job goes to the most qualified person. Duh. If one of the others wants to complain about not being accepted, there's a clear, acceptable, non-race related rationale for rejecting them.

And 6, which reads as a gross parody of South Africa: "Question, Do you consider it right for the African to do this as it is their culture to kill and murder and other nations have no right to tell them what tohow to act?"

Hell no. Murder is wrong, AIDS denialism is wrong, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Cultural relativism is okay when it comes to trivial stuff like which fork you use at the dinner table, but not for such gross violations of simple moral principles that form stable communities.

This has got to be an entirely new level of fail, Gabe. You're too busy poking at exaggerated sitcom hippies to notice that my beliefs are entirely different from theirs. Heck, you haven't figured out where I agree with you or where I disagree with you, despite months of trying to make it obvious.

March 10th: Cries of persecution posted to the Bioshock thread along with the standard inflated ego about how allegedly devastating his arguments are. Naturally, with Gabe, they're very poorly aimed. All the straw men might make a person wonder if Gabe's trying to post to some other guy's blog and it ends up here.

Judging from his post-ban comments, I can essentially say Gabe is retreating: His latest slew of questions were pure softballs. Of course, he already had a trend of making his core terminology more and more nebulous.

If it weren't for a number of the readers getting tired of the unlearning repetition, I'd gladly let them through. I'm leaving them in the moderation queue, so they'll probably show up after a while.

Weekly Gabriel update: He posted some glurge that was just one massive appeal to the future fallacy, sprinkled with NWO conspiracy nuttery, and overall it completely ignored what I believed and thus, utterly fails to deliver any meaningful criticism. Allegedly, I'm supposed to be the old man.

Ending paragraph: "In the distance he could hear the children being taught the "Song of the World", and sighed, "White man Bad, Blackman Good, White man Bad, Black man Good", the world had changed so much, "oh Gabriel", he said, "Why did I not listen?"."

Gabriel, lay off the acid and pot. Just because those things are freely passed around a your postmodernist hippie cult doesn't mean that they're healthy. And no, they won't help you reach "enlightenment." Only science stands a chance at doing that, so make with the science.

I never believed "White man bad, Black man good." I just believed people are people, and everyone should be given a level playing field in the free market. I don't believe there's any meaningful distinction between races, which makes your straw man all the more absurd: There is no "white man" or "black man" in terms of intellect, only a few phenotypes relevant to some genetic dispositions (and those are steadily shrinking as international travel rises.)

Of course, that's what you can expect from someone like Gabriel who thinks he can get a grasp of what I think by reading wikis all day.

You know, it's funny that Gabriel used the phrase "comrade Obama" repeatedly in his glurge, because Gabriel strikes me as pretty Communistic. (And doubly amusing since most non-crazy people I've heard from complain about him being too conservative and/or spineless to accomplish anything except conservative goals.)

Evolution is like capitalism in a way: Real world market forces (natural selection) determines what succeeds and what fails. If you have an ability to gather and use resources your competitors don't, you have an advantage that will probably allow to stay in business long enough to pass your assets onto the next generation.

Eugenics is the opposite: It replaces market forces with dictates from The Party. The Party doesn't care what the real world says, just what their untested, unmonitored ideology says.

State mandated discrimination is like that, too: Instead of allowing the free market from deciding who has useful, marketable skills, The Party dictates that only certain brand names (races) get priority. Something with no measurable real world existence artificially controls the market. Personal discrimination is akin to an irrational love or hatred for brand names, regardless of objective measurements of merit.

The only sorts of regulation I want on the market are the tools we need to trust the vendors: Regulation to assure quality products are allowed to reach the consumer, anti-monopoly laws to prevent de facto control on the market, etcetera.

People should be allowed equal opportunity to develop their skills and be tested fairly by the free market. Communists and Gabriel don't want that pragmatic stance. They want big government to dictate an arbitrary brand preference, free of real world measurement.

Leaves me to wonder if Gabe, when reading about the USA, he accidentally typed "USSR" in his wiki search.

And Gabe tries to call me ignorant by talking about the much more practical socialism (not Communism, Gabe) of Scandinavian countries. The ones, which, if I recall correctly, feature socialized health care that many of us liberals are trying to push for.

Of course, that's not what I'm complaining about, since good medical coverage for everyone will contribute to leveling the playing field.

Racism is still an act of assigning a value based on irrational ideology, rather than allowing the market to determine that value. The more advanced our technology becomes, the more market there will be for educational services.

Of course, Gabriel's the sort who doubts the effects of education because he believes that his nebulous non-genetic, non-physical concept of race is purely deterministic. After all, why would he reject the very idea of all the environmental influences we've thought up out of hand?

More on the USSR angle: Gabriel seems to think of science like Lysenko: He ridiculed scientists for cracking deeper into the nature of genetics by diligently studying fruit flies. Lysenko instead favored the laziness of unreplicable anecdotalism (He can grow peas in winter! Once! When no one else is looking!) and folk wisdom. Sounds just like Gabriel. After all, Gabriel constantly tried to argue that his sloppy anecdotalism was superior to the hard work of thousands.

I gotta be honest, BD: Gabe is damn boring. He was boring before we banned him and he'll continue to be boring as long as we pay him even the scant attention of the weekly updates. I think it's high time that we all left Gabe behind for awhile. Maybe once he realizes that we have other things to talk about, he'll pull a big stunt to get us focused on him again: namely, answering the questions we've been asking all along.

It became clear some time ago (when Gabe was joining in halfway-normal conversations on non-Gabe threads) that we're the closest thing he has to friends. Perhaps I'm giving him a little too much credit in foresight by saying this, but it's possible that he thinks/realizes on some level that if he ever answers our questions and breaks out of the circular conversation he's locked in right now, the game might end and he'd be all alone.

When it comes down to it, Gabe is a lonely bully; the only way he knows how to get attention is to be abusive and say outrageous things. We need to stop engaging him on that level and reinforcing that behavior. We've offered him an avenue to our attention, and we need to close all other paths if we want him to follow it.

So, Gabe: answer our questions and you get to rejoin the conversation. Otherwise, I think the best bet is to completely ignore him and move on.

Gabe, if you end up returning, do try reading the post this comment is attached to. You've been ignoring some rather large elephants in the room. You might be less boring if you'd actually commit to answering them, because your eternal wiffle-waffle got boring.

I thought I'd post an update regarding Gabe some time ago claiming that Dawkins was promoting racist ideals in his latest book.

Well, I've finished reading the thing and I'll say this. Aside from some brief mentions of race in the first couple of chapters, he never once brings it up again for the rest of the book. Those mentions are the same ones I brought up before, ones that in no way promote a racist viewpoint and in fact speak against it. I can safely conclude that either Gabe is grossly mistaken or he never actually bothered to read the book. Of course, among the various questions he never answered, I never did get any specific page numbers from him to look at so I really can't say what he might have misread. However, there's really no wiggle room for misunderstanding even in the few instances race is actually talked about. It would take a monumental effort to misread him as supporting a racist view.

It's all a moot point as Gabe's been absent for some time now, but I thought I'd point it out to sort of finish off this whole chapter.

Dark Jaguar, Gabe alaways seemed to have a bee in his bonnet about Dawkins, trying to twist Dawkins into saying whatever straw man things Gabe wanted to bash.I'm glad that Gabe has gone. His dialogue was stiltedly repeatatively robotic, and his evasions laughable.

Am I the only one not able to see any of the recent posts in this thread? I've heard Blogger has had a lot of commenting issues as of late... It's rather odd considering Google tends to stay on top of glitches like this...